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Natural floorboards shrink and expand with the seasons. This means the best time to fill the emerging floorboard gaps are when they are at their largest.

Through the past months central heating systems may have caused traditional floorboards to shrink opening up wide gaps. These gaps can let cold draughts intrude into rooms making them cold and uncomfortable as well as increasing heating bills.

Now, when the gaps are at their largest is the best time to fill them. DIY gap fillers like papier mache and glue are not able to withstand the movement of the wood and will eventually drop through the gaps. As DraughtEx is very flexible it will expand and contract within the floorboard gap leaving you with peace of mind for years to come.

The same flexible properties also allow an easy installation in a wide range of gaps. Old Victorian houses often have wooden floorboards with strongly varying gaps. Our three different versions of DraughtEx will allow you to cover a gap range of 1-11mm width. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to receive more information or visit our website www.draughtex.co.uk

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Everything preceding this blog post explains the number of complaints against tradespeople in the UK. Unfortunately the problem of unsatisfied customers is further expanded by the home improver doing little research into the actual project they want doing.

Way back in 1990, in a paper called Building Procurement, A. Turner summed up the problem succinctly when he stated “All things being equal, as any customer knows, you can probably have what you want if you know what it is. If you do not know exactly what you want, you will probably end up with partly, or totally, what you don’t want.”

Home owners rely on builders to sometimes read their minds when, full discussion at the outset, via a medium such as the DIY Doctor Desired Outcome Building Contract will remove any doubt in the home improver’s mind.

The Which report of August 2011 concluded that 2.5 million people have had a dispute with a builder or decorator in the last 3 years and the most common disagreement was the quality of the work.

Other complaints were mostly about bad timekeeping by traders and properties being left very untidy. The report also states that 25% of homeowners went ahead with the work despite not receiving a written quote or contract from the trader.

Finally the report concludes that almost 20% of complaint cases in 2010 ended up in court.

As if all those statistics were not bad enough, Trading Standards reports that in 2011 £170m was stolen by cowboys in 2010 through taking deposits and not finishing work

DIY Doctor’s own survey in October 2011 showed

• 76% of people who receive more than one quote are confused as to why there is such extensive variation
• 1 in 3 homeowners who have had work done had problems with the contractor they chose
• Next year 43% of home improvers plan a garden makeover of some kind and there has been a huge increase in complaints against cowboy gardeners

In the final part of this story we are pleased to announce that we are working very hard to eliminate the risks involved with employing tradespeople of any kind in your home. Our Home Improvement Protection Solution offers peace of mind with many practical measures that can be taken to protect your home. We have much more lined up.

Please post your comments to help us provide the best support we can for home improvers.

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Experian, a global credit information group, lists over 515,000 companies in a huge number of categories in the construction industry. In its public database, where it uses information from Yellow Pages and other sources, there are categories ranging from Energy Conservation Consultants to Sash Window Repairers.   

However, a 2010 report commissioned by Key Note Market Research lists only 340,000 ‘firms (employing around 2 million people)’ actually registered to the industry through HMRC, Trade Associations, Companies House.

This means there could be as many as 200,000 unregistered companies out there. These are guys that are deliberately getting under the radar in any form of registration including the most basic of requirements, Public Liability Insurance.

The Key Note House building report 2011 states that the output of the housing sector was estimated to be £32.6bn. The private sector accounts for 68% of this output, with repair, maintenance and improvement accounting for 50% of that amount.

This totals £11bn being spent in an industry where, according to the surveys, almost 40% of the industry workforce is not registered as an accountable agency!

From a survey conducted by the Federation of Master Builders in the last quarter of 2010 it is seen that 32% of registered building companies has experienced a decline in the work coming in. This, it was concluded, was due in part by more DIY work being undertaken as well as more work being given to the cheaper, unregistered tradesmen. This in turn was seen to be due in part to the increase in the VAT rate to 20%.

Enquiries to the FBM for renovation and repair work were down 25% in the first quarter of 2011 indicating that a great many home improvers are looking for cheaper ways of getting work done. This confirms what DIY Doctor has been saying for a long time. Home owners think they are saving money by employing unregistered trades.

(Source: Federation of Master Builders, State of Trade survey Q1, 2011)

While researching the number of small construction companies that have public liability insurance DIY Doctor has only been able to find information dating back to 1999 where a commercial insurance for small businesses Market Assessment was done by Key Note Market Intelligence and noted that insurance in general is a low priority for small businesses with public liability being ignored as an acceptable risk.

You can find out more about avoiding cowboy builders by using our Home Improver Protection Solution.

 Please post your comments to help us provide the best support we can for home improvers.

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As early as March 2005 a critique was published by G.D.Holt and D.J Edwards, both academics in the Department of Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University, and writing for the Journal of Construction research.  They stated that because of the home improvers fear of ‘cowboy syndrome’, approximately £4bn worth of required domestic repair and maintenance work actually went undone, leading to dilapidation and further disrepair. This contributes to the NERD problem discussed in part 2 of this cowboy story.

(Ref: Domestic Builder Selection in the UK housing repair and maintenance sector)

The report concluded that despite several futile attempts by trade bodies and Government schemes, the best way to tackle this problem was from the ‘demand side’. This means educating the consumers and helping them learn ways to avoid cowboys. DIY Doctor and Service Magic are doing just that.

Independently, the DTI reports (as early as 2001) that over 50% of UK construction companies are one man bands while 35% employ 2 or 3 workers.

Many of these workers are not registered at either Companies House or with HRM and the Holt report above indicates that a great number of these people are slipping under the income tax and VAT radar. They are being allowed to make profits because many home improvers take advantage of cash offers from them. Unfortunately, as further statistics show, the ultimate cost is greater than the savings.

As long ago as July 1999 the Builders Merchants Journal reported in a survey that 89% of home owners agreed that there should be a law preventing unregistered tradesmen from trading and a huge 95% agreed that, at the very least, workers in the building industry should be registered like workers in other industries.

In the Contract Journal, January 2003, a further survey carried out by NEMS, a market research company, showed that 51% of people do not trust tradesmen, 40% say they would never use someone who was not approved and 54% would be happy to pay more to use an approved tradesman.

You can find out more about avoiding cowboy builders by using our Home Improver Protection Solution.

Please post your comments to help us provide the best support we can for home improvers.

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The skills gap reported by Confused.com in the same survey, showed one of the reasons for an increase in the use of UK tradespeople by concluding that Britons over estimate their DIY skill level dramatically when it comes to undertaking home improvement projects.

A survey by Halifax in April 2008 and repeated since, shows that 7 million British households are now living with some form of unfinished home renovation project and 1 million of these have been in this position for more than 10 years. Halifax have christened these people NERDS, standing for Never Ending Renovation Disaster.

The impact of this has been huge in terms of the number of people now turning to “cheap” builders to put matters right when homeowners realise that it is now becoming very hard to sell a house in anything less than perfect condition if a true value is to be realised.

This has placed a demand on the building industry to provide more labour and with fewer apprenticeships available and less money for training, together with a labour attitude of general unwillingness to spend money on insurance and instruction, much of this labour is less than qualified.

An abstract from a report by Martyn Dyson from the Business Journal, Mortgage Strategy on 24^th October 2011, states that there are (mortgage) borrowers out there that want to upsize but do not feel it is possible. A possible solution is to improve and in some circumstances this can be more cost effective than moving.

The example he gives is the £40,000 difference in moving from a 3 to 4 bed property when to have an additional bedroom added as an extension to the property can amount to only £30,000 in many cases.

The homeowner, armed with these facts, sees (in a great many cases) only the savings and financial rewards. Mike Edwards of DIY Doctor Ltd says “Unfortunately, our research and our own surveys show that the home improver very often fails to undertake vital research in commissioning the right tradesperson and the complexities of the build itself.”

“Very often,” continues Mike, “the home improver will not have a definitive idea of what they actually want and will rely totally on the tradesman’s experience to support their basic ideas. Unfortunately because of all the reasons presented in this blog, it would seem that a huge number of tradesmen these days do not have either the experience or the interest to do this. The home improver is then left dissatisfied and most often out of pocket.”

You can find out more about avoiding cowboy builders by using our Home Improver Protection Solution.

Please post your comments to help us provide the best support we can for home improvers.

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